Her stomach clenches and she desperately holds her mouth shut, hands clamped tight over her thin surgical mask. Some of the other passengers glance at her; she’s breaking public transit’s unspoken agreement, drawing attention to herself. It’s fucking embarrassing. It’s really not helping.
Sticky-sweet doll-guts ooze out through the cracks in her teeth as she chews, mouth grinding in ceaseless motion. She’s a messy eater, our monster is, and her meal drips down to stain her ample chest and her temporary cell’s clean tile floor. By the time she’s done ruined dollstuff puddles around her feet and the poor broken thing’s porcelain shell is stretched as open as we’ve ever seen a doll’s corpse.
(I’m not sure if I ever posted this one publicly; back when I still had a patreon it was there, but now … well, here it is. 2.1k words of trauma and spiders)
Kids on one side of the glass, the spider on the other. There are three of them there on that sticky summer day, Grace and Florence and Ash, set adrift in the zoo’s carefully curated expanse while their three sets of parents get drunk and reminisce about old times. They’re all old enough to be left alone—and more than old enough to insist that they’d rather not have an older teen disinterestedly keeping an eye on them—but not old enough to be left to downtown’s tender mercies. There are kidnappers about, everyone knows that! And worse things too, lurking in the shadows and blasted across every news channel lest anyone might forget that the world is a dangerous place.
This piece was originally posted to Twitter on July 18, 2022.
She’s smoking on the roof again, leaning back against the railing with her head tilted up to stare into the rotting orange sky. There’s no point in looking down or out, no point in letting her gaze wash over the city so far below. She’s seen it all before.
The way down’s lit up by her halo’s spotlight, shining painfully bright against the night’s uneasy shadows. Each inch of the fall thrown into sharp relief, from the ease with which she could tip back over the too-low railing to the places she’d have to flare her wings to escape the skyscraper’s setbacks, gathering speed all the while, plummeting down faster and faster and faster—
She doesn’t get a chance to understand before it kills her.
This story was originally posted to Twitter on June 6, 2022.
Long-forgotten Fireflies finds her doll huddled outside, its display case’s well-polished glass shining in the little nook between two of the building’s many trash cans.
She hums happily and kneels down beside it.
“Hey, Lace. What are you doing out here?”
It doesn’t meet her gaze.
It’s garbage day, but they’re so far into the concrete forest that the truck won’t reach them until the evening; that vast thing rumbling past is just a bus, no matter its grasping arms or Lace’s hopeful gaze as it passes it by.
It is said that devils hunger for souls, and many a wayward maiden—and dispossessed gentleman—quakes with fear at the prospect of what might befall them if they misjudge the stranger who so kindly offers them a warm bed, a hearty meal, a heavy purse …
For, oh! So easily may an immortal soul be lost! Eternity hangs in the balance at every moment, so vulnerable, so delectable. Each moment of life teeters in the balance between paradise and damnation, and the light of tender grace will never penetrate the darkness beyond that too-sharp smile.